'Snowpiercer' a frozen train to future

FILE - In this July 29, 2013 file photo, film director Bong Joon-ho, left, actor Chris Evans and actress Tilda Swinton pose for the media during a press conference of their new film "Snowpiercer" in Seoul, South Korea. A Hong Kong film festival on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013 unveiled a lineup bookended b

/ AP

FILE - In this July 29, 2013 file photo, film director Bong Joon-ho, left, actor Chris Evans and actress Tilda Swinton pose for the media during a press conference of their new film "Snowpiercer" in Seoul, South Korea. A Hong Kong film festival on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013 unveiled a lineup bookended by an action movie inspired by director John Woo's works and the South Korean sci-fi action thriller featuring Hollywood stars Swinton and Evans.(AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)

FILE - In this July 29, 2013 file photo, film director Bong Joon-ho, left, actor Chris Evans and actress Tilda Swinton pose for the media during a press conference of their new film "Snowpiercer" in Seoul, South Korea. A Hong Kong film festival on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013 unveiled a lineup bookended by an action movie inspired by director John Woo's works and the South Korean sci-fi action thriller featuring Hollywood stars Swinton and Evans.(AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File) (/ AP)

“Snowpiercer”

Rating: R

When: Opens Wednesday

Where: AMC La Jolla 12 and Reading Gaslamp 15

Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes

★★★

Big-budget movies today are made for a truly global audience, as Hollywood has come to rely on overseas box office receipts just as much as those from the United States. This has led to a homogenizing of content, because the studios need those movies to be accessible to everyone, everywhere, no matter how old they are or what language they might speak.

The new film “Snowpiercer” is just as international in scale, but also in terms of its content, theme and its very creation. Shot by director Joon-ho Bong in his native Korea, it’s based on a French graphic novel and stars a slew of high-profile, primarily English-speaking actors from around the world, delivering an analogy of civilization’s decline on a global level.

The setup is timely, simple and intense. Months from now, the world’s governments inject a chemical into the atmosphere in the hopes of slowing global warming. It does the trick and then some, freezing the entire planet and killing virtually every human except those who were able to get themselves onto the Snowpiercer, a tremendously long train that barrels at epic speeds across the frozen planet via a system of interconnected tracks.

For 18 years, the people at the back of the train, who live in squalor and are regularly executed and oppressed by soldiers from the front, have tried to make their way to the front, where the engine is controlled by the visionary Wilford (a well-known actor whose identity I’ll not reveal here). Tired of eating protein jelly and led by Curtis (Chris Evans, who is as snarkily charming as anyone but Robert Downey, Jr.), the downtrodden attack the wealthy, who are rallied by Wilford’s second-in-command, Mason (Tilda Swinton, wonderfully bizarre).

Curtis’ people force their way, through battles involving guns, knives, barrels, propaganda, and an industrial waste narcotic, to the front of the train, encountering aspects of civilization that make sense early on, and eventually devolve into bacchanalian revels that show what portions of humanity do when they thrive on the excess denied to the rest. Once he makes it, Curtis must confront Wilford and make choices that will change the entire future of humanity.

With almost every bit of it set in the close quarters of a moving train, the movie is gorgeously shot, and it often feels as though you can see the cinematic fingerprints of Park Chan-wook, the legendary Korean filmmaker, who served as a producer. The rest of the cast is impressive as well, and includes Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Alison Pill and Song Kang-ho, who starred in Bong’s breakthrough monster movie “The Host.”

The production design is sharp and unique, though the movie itself is not without its flaws. There are pacing and tonal shifts, and its metaphor is entirely overt. Train or not, as a species we’re moving forward at an incredible clip, destroying everything around us and at war with ourselves. “Snowpiercer” is a manifestation of that idea, a reminder that it won’t take much for us to jump the track made up of our collective destiny, because if the current form of civilization is a bullet train headed for disaster, it might be the train itself, rather than its engineer, that is the problem.